The Metal Trades Council Union alliance in Seattle shut down the shipyards on February 6, 1919, in hopes of forcing a promised pay increase following the strict price controls set during World War I. After the Metal Trades Council obtained the support of Seattle's Central Labor Alliance, more than 65,000 Seattle workers staged a sympathy walkout, creating what has come to be known as the first "general strike" in U.S. history, and laying the foundation for labor unrest in the nation's steel, coal, and meatpacking industries in the years that followed.

This website documents the history of this strike through a large collection of primary and secondary source materials.

A four-minute video introduction, containing original film footage from 1919, is a useful place to begin for those unfamiliar with Seattle's labor history.

The website also includes contemporary and more recent newspaper articles, including more than 180 articles from Seattle's major newspapers covering the February 1919 events; 15 oral histories; more than 30 photographs of labor activity in Seattle, prominent union members, and strike activities; as well as research reports on the strike by history students at the University of Washington.

Harvard University's Social Museum was established in 1903 as part of the University's newly-formed Department of Social Ethics, devoted to the comparative study of social conditions and institutions in the United States and abroad. This website presents more than 6,000 images from the Social Museum's collection, including photographs, pamphlets, prints, and architectural drawings. Images are available though an extensive search function, with a keyword search, artist list (including photographers Lewis Hine and Francis Benjamin Johnston), and 37 topics (e.g. anarchism, charity, government, health, education, housing, Socialism, and war). Also available is an online exhibit that introduces three of the Social Museum's primary subjects of study: Poor Relief, Social Justice, and Industrial Betterment. This section can serve as an introduction for those unfamiliar with the progressive era and early 20th-century social reform movements in the United States and abroad.

Curated by Carl Smith, Professor of English and American Studies at Northwestern University in a collaborative effort with the Chicago Historical Society, this rich site provides an online exhibit commemorating one of the most notorious incidents in late-nineteenth-century labor history, the Haymarket Affair. On May 4, 1886, two workers were killed in a struggle between police and locked-out union members at the McCormick Reaper factory. On May 5, 1886, someone threw a dynamite bomb into a group of Chicago policemen sent to control the ensuing protest, killing seven. This site is an online exhibit of selected materials from the Chicago Historical Society's Haymarket Affair Digital Collection. Organized in the form of a drama, the site contains a prologue, five acts, and an epilogue, all arranged chronologically.

The prologue, "Whither America," covers the period between Chicago's Great Fire in 1871 through 1880, with emphasis on the railroad strike of 1877 and other developments in the radicalization of American workers. Act I, "Subterranean Fire," discusses the widening class divisions and resulting rising level of violence in America. Act II, "Let Your Tragedy be Enacted Here," recounts the demonstrations of 1886, the protestors' meeting, and the bombing. Act III, "Toils of the Law," covers the legal proceedings beginning with the "red scare" and police "witch hunt" following the bombing and continuing through the sentencing of the convicted anarchists in October 1886. Act IV, "Voice of People," relates the legal and public appeals ending with the executions of 1887. Act V, "Raising the Dead," moves from the funerals of the executed men to Governor John P. Altgeld's pardon of the surviving defendants in 1893.

The epilogue, "Drama Without End," deals with the contested heritage of Haymarket, including centennial events in 1986. Each part consists of a 500-word interpretive essay and topical sections including a total of over 50 visual materials, such as images of artifacts, photographs, and engravings of the people involved in the Haymarket Affair, and over 30 facsimiles of selected manuscripts and printed materials. Each "Act" contains a final section that includes full-text transcriptions of documents from the Haymarket Digital Collection. The site also includes virtual tours of the Haymarket area and of Forest Home Cemetery, where a monument to the convicted men is located, and audio recordings of contemporary labor songs. This site is beautifully contextualized, well-presented, and easy to navigate. It contains a keyword search engine as well as a table of contents.

Based on an exhibit of the same name, this website provides a look at the Detroit Publishing Company (DPC) photographs of the Western United States from 1895 to 1924. The site is arranged for easy browsing into nine sections: DPC History, "How did they do it?," Cityscapes, Everyday Life, Foreign Views, Getting Around, Michigan Views, Nature, and Workplace; and each section contains 24 to 38 photographs. The first section covers the early years of the company and provides information about DPC photographers and the creation and distribution of pictures. The everyday life photos include images of cowboys shooting craps, children in Chinatown, and an African American Emancipation Day celebration in Richmond, VA. The foreign views section consists of snapshots taken in Mexico, Venezuela, the Bahamas, and Switzerland. Roughly 40 photographs focus on the state of Michigan. The nature images, the most popular of the company's photographs, are majestic and many of them fed the growing tourist industry. The section of workplace images rounds out this site and includes harvest scenes, loggers in Michigan, smelters, oyster pickers in Louisiana, and cotton gin workers. For those interested in the history of photography, this easily navigable site is a valuable resource.

A complement to the four-hour PBS television series, this site presents unseen footage of World War II, the first war recorded primarily on color film. It brings the wartime experience of Americans on the battlefield and home front vividly to life through original color film clips and photographs. The site is divided into four main areas, including Battlefield, Psychology of War, the Home Front, and Social Aspects. Each section allows visitors to navigate through the different subtopics, read excerpts from diaries and letters, view nearly 250 photographs available for the first time, and watch rare color film clips of the period.

"Battlefield" includes homage to Pearl Harbor as well as film footage of covert American operations. "Psychology of War" contains a section entitled "The Atomic Option" that presents a video montage of images of an atomic bomb dropping on Nagasaki, Japan. Within this section, there is also a video of a Jewish Ghetto in Warsaw, Poland. "Homefront" includes five subsections, including censorship and migration. "Social Aspects" includes African Americans, Asians, Women, and Anti-Semitism. The footage of German American youth in New Jersey in the 1940s marching with fascist flags is very compelling. Visitors will also find an interactive timeline, essays on rediscovering the film footage, and a teaching guide for educators Those interested in this unforgettable period of history will find this site instructive.

This compelling, well-designed site offers a rare glimpse into the World War II experiences of Japanese Americans in two Arkansas internment camps. A series of 30 photographs illuminates the daily lives of inmates at school, in a clinic, working at a sawmill. Physical conditions in the camp are captured effectively by several aerial views. Three QuickTime Virtual Reality (QTVR) images that allow for 360-degree ground-level views are equally impressive. These photographs are supported by an in-depth timeline of events, an interactive map, and an extensive education section providing links to resources hosted by other sites.

This site illustrates the ways in which the late 19th-century history of Minnesota is tied to the rise of and connection between four industries: lumbering, sawmilling, farming, and flour milling. The site uses a comic book-like format (large picture panels with minimal text), and incorporates the diaries and personal recollections of four Minnesotans who participated as lumbermen, sawyers, farmers, or flour millers. The colorful format attracts attention and the short presentations are appropriate for younger viewers (elementary, middle, and even high school students). The site relies primarily on Flash to present the stories, but viewers can also read and view the stories in HTML.

Each segment provides links to outside resources (about 40 in all) for additional information. Explanatory links define terms that might be unfamiliar to visitors, suggest topics for discussion, and offer additional supporting materials (for example, the site links internally to approximately 50 period photographs and diary entries). Teachers may find useful the nine suggestions for classroom activities, such as analyzing photographic evidence or examining the perspective of one of the storytellers.